I hope this update finds you well after a relaxing Christmas and New Year period. I trust that you all received those VR headsets from Santa that you’ve been longing for!

As we’ve all been told countless times, the start of a new year is an opportune time to set our goals for the forthcoming 12 months. Often, this thought process has us focusing on what we hope to achieve, possibly even how we plan to do so. However, what we commonly fail to determine is a clear and honest understanding of why we want to achieve our “whats”.

Over the break, I have been reading Simon Sinek’s “Start with why”, which has helped reinforce my own motivations behind building Unleashed VR. My “why” stems back to 2007 when, as fresh faced undergraduates, my (now) wife, Kate, and I, moved to Beijing to learn about Chinese culture and Mandarin. That period was interspersed with culture shock, lack of a close network and constant body-slams to our pride whenever we tried to speak Mandarin.

To help me through difficult periods living abroad, I turned to several personal development and life skill solutions. I found some of these guides and courses useful, others full of empty rhetoric that served only as a short-term boost in motivation, but lacking long-term application or benefit. Since then, I’ve had a passion for understanding the mind and what makes us, as complicated intelligent chimpanzees, tick.

Over the past year, I have interviewed many people and conducted research to determine what the main problems are with solutions in the soft skills training and personal development industries. In late 2014, I began reading about VR’s potential as a new and highly effective tool that could provide a safe yet challenging learning environment.

It is from these personal experiences and research that I draw upon Unleashed VR’s “why”. The company’s sole purpose is to help individuals, teams and businesses, to “unleash” their potential, leading to a better quality of life for individuals and more effective employees for organisations (our why). This core believe in human potential is embodied in our name and logo, which is derived from the infinity symbol. We plan to work towards our vision by giving people the knowledge, skills and confidence to improve their self-awareness and emotional intelligence (our how) and we will deliver this value through specialised VR-based soft skills training programs (our what).

The above is a short summary of the evolution of Unleashed VR to date: why we exist, what we are building, and how we are building it.

As always, I’d love to hear if you have any comments, feedback or questions about Unleashed VR.